'Call of Duty: Black Ops' hits $1 billion mark

Call of Duty: Black Ops continues to outpace the success of its predecessor, last year's Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which eventually became the second best-selling video game of all-time in the U.S.

Activision has announced that the game has crossed the $1 billion mark in worldwide sales since its Nov. 9 release -- something it took an additional month (until January 2010) for Modern Warfare 2 to do. Black Ops compares "to any other entertainment property that ever existed," says Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick. "It's a bigger number in a shorter amount of time than any form of entertainment has generated in terms of revenues."

With an estimated 16 million copies of the game sold to date -- Activision did not release a specific figure for unit sales -- Black Ops has generated more than 600 million hours of online gameplay so far. Citing Xbox Live figures from Microsoft, Activision says that the average player logs onto the game more than once a day and plays for more than one hour each time. More than half of that time is spent playing online with and against friends.

"That is really the big story to me," Kotick says. "Not just that it has generated $1 billion, but that more people play game the game daily than read USA TODAY and The New York Times combined. More people play the game every day than watch Leno, Letterman and Jimmy Fallon combined. Those are the kind of things that I think are staggering."

Upon Black Ops launch in its first five days, the game sold more than $650 million worldwide, beating similar five-day global records for movies, books and other video games, Activision says. Modern Warfare 2 set the previous five-day worldwide record with $550 million.

Most forecasts had Black Ops falling short of Modern Warfare 2's performance because the conventional wisdom was that development studio Treyarch's games would not match that of fellow Activision studio Infinity Ward. "From our original expectations we are certainly surprised (at Black Ops' success), but these are the kind of experiences where they take on a life of their own," Kotick says.

"One of the things we have uniquely benefitted from is there were already tens of millions of Call of Duty players, whether they tried Modern Warfare or Modern Warfare 2 or World At War ... who continue playing this game over and over and the audiences are really, really large," he says. "From that perspective, what we are continuing to do is satisfy the tastes and interests and the needs of the audiences. I will say that I think we get better and better at soliciting the input and feedback of the audience. One of the reasons we are so confident in the future of the Call of Duty franchise is that a lot of what we are doing at the various studios that are making Call of Duty games is based entirely on feedback that is coming from a large body of users. This is something I think Blizzard has done exceptionally well and has been integrated into the DNA of the Call of Duty business -- really spending the time to solicit the feedback of the audience and what they would like to see and not just listening but actually translating that insight into the game."

About Treyarch, Kotick said that "they have established themselves as one of the great studios of the world."

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About Mike Snider

Mike Snider began covering the video game industry during the Super Nintendo-Sega Genesis clash in 1992. An original pinball wizard, he eventually was seduced by Robotron: 2084 and Tempest. These days he is a fan of action/shooters and lives out his Keith Moon fantasies playing a mean drum kit on music games. More about Mike.

About Brett Molina

Brett Molina has been writing about video games for USA TODAY since 2005. He is well-versed in Madden NFL, the fighting genre and first-person shooters. The first video game he played was Asteroids at a local arcade. He has been hooked ever since. More about Brett.